20 May 2026 · 7 min read
What a computer AMC should include, and what to check before signing
A response time in writing, a named engineer, preventive visits and an asset register you keep. If the contract does not state the exclusions, that is the clause you will argue about in month seven.
Comprehensive or non-comprehensive, and why it matters
A comprehensive AMC covers labour, scheduled preventive visits and the spares named in the contract. A non-comprehensive AMC covers the labour and the visits, and parts are billed as they are used. Both are legitimate; the trap is not knowing which you have signed.
Ask for the spares list in the comprehensive version. A contract that says 'parts included' without naming which parts, up to what value, is a disagreement waiting for the day a motherboard fails.
Response time is the only number that matters
Every vendor says they respond quickly. Ask for two numbers in the contract instead: how long until someone responds, and how long until an engineer is on site. Then ask what happens when they are missed.
The distinction matters because a phone call inside thirty minutes is not the same as an engineer arriving. For a billing counter or a production line, on-site time is the number the business actually feels.
Preventive visits are where the value is
The cheapest fault is the one caught on a scheduled visit. A failing disk reporting errors, a backup job that stopped succeeding three weeks ago, a drive at 97 percent, a UPS with dead batteries — all of these are visible before they stop work, and all of them are invisible if nobody looks.
A contract that only responds to failures is insurance. A contract with preventive visits is maintenance. The second one costs slightly more and saves considerably more.
Insist on the asset register, and on owning it
You should end the first month of any AMC holding a list of every machine, its serial, its warranty expiry, its IP address and what software is licensed to it. That register is what makes next year's budget a calculation rather than a guess.
It is also what protects you when you change vendor. An estate nobody has documented is an estate you cannot competitively re-tender, which is precisely why some vendors never produce one.
- Every machine, with serial number and warranty expiry date
- Licence entitlements, with renewal dates
- IP addressing, VLAN plan and switch port map
- Admin credentials held by the organisation, not by an individual
- The escalation path, with names, when the first response is missed
Also asked
Follow-up questions
Is an AMC cheaper than paying per call-out?
- Cheaper in most years and much cheaper in a bad one, but the real saving is not the labour rate. It is that a stopped billing counter or production line is not waiting on whether an engineer happens to be free that afternoon.
Can a new vendor take over an AMC mid-way?
- Yes, and it should start with an audit rather than a contract. Inherited estates routinely hold expired licences, undocumented admin passwords and backups that stopped running, and you want that findings list before you commit to anything.
What should be explicitly excluded from an AMC?
- Consumables, physical damage, and anything caused by power problems outside the equipment's protection are the normal exclusions. That is reasonable — what matters is that they are written down rather than discovered during a dispute.
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One contract, a named engineer and a response time you can hold us to. We keep an asset register from day one, so you always know what you own and what is out of warranty.
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